Learning Won’t Happen in a Silo.
And that goes for teachers, too.
I noticed something intriguing when I was visiting a school this week. It’s not unique to this school but on this day, it became very apparent to me.
We must remember that we need schools so that we can learn together.
What does learning together really look like?
Learning looks like all the people in the space talking, thinking aloud and, sometimes, wrestling with what we think on our own. We refer to this as ‘working alone together’ but it should be used sparingly rather than prolifically as happens in some classrooms.
It's so common that we ask young people to write things in their books without sharing or questioning their thinking or the information. This practice of recording current thinking is not learning.
“I argue that learning has become less social as education has progressed into a mass-market activity.” Logan, 2016.
Further to this, Goodhart’s (2019) research found that “…learning in many cases arises from social interaction, not from individual study. Consequently, informational contagion is baked into our social and economic systems.”
Logan (2016) shares that we must consider redesigning learning from a #socialfirst principle, focussing on developing people rather than students. He suggests multiple ways we might facilitate this in the classroom:
- Facilitate dialogue rather than monologue or lecture.
- Facilitate interactions that build upon knowledge through speech, writing and drawing.
- Consider how to make assessment a collaborative exercise.
- Encourage doing tasks together, in groups.
And a few more adapted from Ritchhart’s (2011) Making Thinking Visible:
- Have a ‘thinking wall’ in the learning space where known-knowns, known-unknowns and wondering can be visible, all together.
- Use the thinking or data wall to make conclusions, build experiments and simply converse about the concept at hand.
- Encourage the use of thinking tools such as the ‘5 Whys’ or the ‘SQUID’ in teams rather than individually.
- Facilitate Socratic Seminars or Middle Ground dialogic sessions.
Not only that, but Wilson (2019) found that “…team teaching in a collaborative space is beneficial to teachers, as it provides the opportunity to co-reflect and engage in professional dialogue about improving classroom practice and procedures with trusted colleagues.”
